Stanford School of Medicine equipping students with Apple's iPad - Page 2

As much as the environmentally active folks want the rest of the world to go green, it's not going to happen overnight. I, and many other business owners are still waiting for native printing. I depend upon printed material as do the majority of academia. When native printing comes to the iPad, I'll gladly lay down money and purchase them for myself and my staff.

As much as the environmentally active folks want the rest of the world to go green, it's not going to happen overnight. I, and many other business owners are still waiting for native printing. I depend upon printed material as do the majority of academia. When native printing comes to the iPad, I'll gladly lay down money and purchase them for myself and my staff.

No, I mean native printing, as in, "While Apple is keen to tout the iPad as a true alternative to the PC, pushing its web browsing, email, photos and video viewing capabilities, it does lack some features when it comes to business productivityone of which is native printing support.

While the iPad is far to limited in capability for my use, I bought one for my niece. She has a vision impairment and has trouble reading books. She found the books and web sites much easier to read with the iPad than a laptop because she can hold it closer to her eyes and also the zoom and pan work great. She is about to be home schooled and I got her the 3G version as her parents will be traveling a lot ( due to work ). It will keep her connected to family and friends as they travel.

I spent a few hours setting it up for her and activating the 3G. It is a cool device, but desperately needs some access to the file system other than iTunes. The ability to do simple WiFi transfers would be most useful. I put pages and numbers on it, but having to email the files or transfer through iTunes is a pain in the rear...

However, I think students will really like this device....

I can honestly say that it is an incredible device for people with vision problems. Apple, does not promote this ability much, but people with limited ( or no ) sight really need to know about it's abilities. I have not seen her that happy in a long time. She said it was like Apply designed a device just for her....

And education in general. An idea many schools are adopting. Which is one of the reasons why the non ipad tablets will fail. They aren't on the market for schools to adopt and so many if not most will go with what there is -- the ipad.

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Originally Posted by TheShepherd

Only if they can sterilize them.

There are already companies like Nextware and Otterbox that make fully surrounding cases for the iphones and (at least with Otterbox) the ipad. Wouldn't be that hard to make something that could be wiped down with sterile solution with no liquid damage.

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Originally Posted by dagamer34

If anything, we really need more textbooks on the iPad. Thing is, I'd rather not see my iPad littered with apps that are books, and the folder organization in iOS4 would be too clunky.

In an ideal world, each publisher would have a singular app for all their titles or even better someone would make a single 'textbook' app that would work rather like the ibook app and allow for highlighting, notes and even cross links between titles.

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Originally Posted by dasein

If books drop under their own cost and weight, the College would simply lease the space out to some other entity for some other use.

On campus Apple stores with one to one and a genius bar. Apple gets more sales for their stuff and the kiddies have support when there are problems. It's a win.

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Originally Posted by AjitMD

Under the old medical school teaching system, the average class generated about 100 pages of classes notes/day via the note taking service. Do the math assuming only 150 days of classes/year... even if for just 2 years. This is addition to the textbooks that are mostly bulky. Even in residency, most text books are heavy... medicine, surgery, ent, neuro, etc.

thus the appeal of digital systems. especially for the books.

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Worse, is that they get out dated and have to be replaced. It is hard to carry any books around, quick access or even to refer them around the house or office/hospital.

The beauty of digital is that it could be possible to set up a system that would update the information as needed. Perhaps even 'push' it so that you can't forget to check. Or even link into systems like Medline, Westlaw etc to see the latest research, case law etc

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The iPad is great device, though some improvements could be added over time:
1. Higher resolution screen like the iPhone 4.0.
2. More storage memory to store images and video in hi resolution, like path slides, radiology images, etc.
3. Camera for quick acquisition and transmission of images for consultation and record over a secure HIPPA compliant system.

all in good time. Remember this is just the first ipad model. They took a huge gamble with it. Now that it is paying off there's cause to go to the added effort of souping it up